They now look for a place where the Chairman can rest

It involves claims to the holy city of Jerusalem. It includes the complicated logistics needed to stage a state funeral for a leader who does not have a state: Scores of presidents and dignitaries would have to be transported through Israeli checkpoints into occupied land where an uprising rages.

Arafat’s desire was to be buried in Jerusalem, preferably on the revered site of the Al-Aqsa mosque, in the shadow of the golden Dome of the Rock, said Ikrema Sabri, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The plateau on the edge of Jerusalem’s Old City is known to the Jews as Temple Mount, and is the holiest site in Judaism. Palestinians claim eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City, as the capital of a future state. Jews claim all of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.

The Israeli government fears that allowing the Palestinians to bury Arafat in Jerusalem gives them a foothold to pursue their claim to the city. Placing Arafat in the vicinity of the Temple Mount would outrage many Jews. Jerusalem, as one Israeli Cabinet minister put it, is for burying ‘‘Jewish kings, not Arab terrorists.’’

The Israeli prohibition would seem to rule out the eastern suburb of Abu Dis, a historically Arab village mentioned by some Palestinians as an alternative because of its proximity to Jerusalem. A view of the Dome of the Rock was once possible from Abu Dis, but the village now lies behind lumbering concrete wall that Israel is building to fend off Palestinian attacks.

And so Israel is supporting the idea of sending Arafat to his final repose in Gaza. One option is the Khan Yunis cemetery where Arafat’s father and sister are buried.

A visit there shows it a difficult place to hold a state funeral. The small, private cemetery is flanked on one side by an open-air food market and on the other by a shantytown of low-slung buildings whose tin roofs are held in place by stacks of concrete blocks.

Arafat’s beloved sister Inam was buried here in 1999, under a flat, white-stone tomb, and next to her is the grave presumed to be that of their father, Abdel Raouf. It is unmarked, not an uncommon practice among older Palestinians, but bears the same wilted purple flowers of Inam’s tomb.

The cemetery belongs to three of Khan Yunis’ oldest families. The Agha family was related by marriage to Arafat’s father, which is how he ended up here. Mohammed Batta, the head of another of the owning families, remembers Arafat’s father as a simple man who frequently stopped by for tea.

Batta, 75, in a gold-trimmed robe and snow-white kaffiyeh, said he would be proud to bury the older man’s son in his cemetery. But he acknowledged that the plot was very small, and the impoverished city — one of the most conservative in the volatile Gaza Strip — would have difficulties accommodating dignitaries and reporters.

A second sister, Yusra, is buried in a walled-off corner of the larger Sheik Radwan cemetery, where top leaders of the radical Islamic Hamas movement, assassinated by Israel during the last year, are also interred. Access to this site is much improved over Khan Yunis, though still problematic.

A herd of goats scampered through the cemetery when a reporter visited this week. Arafat could be buried in a more elaborate site constructed specifically for the purpose in his presidential compound near Gaza’s seashore. Or, some senior Palestinian leaders may opt for Ramallah in West Bank, rejecting Gaza on the grounds they find it offensive to accede to Israel’s wishes on such an emotional matter. A mausoleum inside the Muqata, for example, the compound where Arafat endured an Israeli siege for more than two years, could fit the bill. — (LA Times-Washington Post)